


Long Into the Abyss

by missrainbowpie



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Mind Control, Romance, Self-Harm, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-23
Updated: 2016-05-23
Packaged: 2018-06-10 06:50:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6944209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missrainbowpie/pseuds/missrainbowpie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marcus’ life is in danger as a war wages within Abby’s mind. Based on the promo for 3x13.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Long Into the Abyss

**Author's Note:**

> I originally posted this on Tumblr before 3x13 aired. It has since become very AU.

“Just tell us where Clarke and the others are hiding,” Abigail Griffin heard herself say, scarcely recognizing the sound of her own voice. Cold and heartless, it was so far from her true voice that was now buried deep within her subconscious. The only thing left on the surface was the empty shell of who she used to be. She saw Marcus Kane below her, his pained face ghostly pale against the impenetrable darkness of the Polis night. All she wanted to do was free him –

– but she couldn’t. She heard his cries of agony as he was tortured with blow after blow, cut after cut. She could smell the salt in the beads of perspiration on his skin, taste the metallic blood on her lip. She could feel heat from the fire and each pulse of Marcus’ frenetic heartbeat as it vibrated through the air. Yet there was nothing she could do; she was slowly killing the second man she had ever loved, just as she had killed the first, and all she could do was watch. She was trapped inside her own body, helpless, and utterly broken.

“I can’t do that,” he spit out.

If she had control of her lungs, she would have breathed out a sigh of relief at his continued resistance. In the past few months, she had seen him develop a bond with Clarke. They hadn’t spent much time together, but he had begun to treat her like his own daughter. Abby saw it in the little things: the way he slightly touched her forearm, the way he found just the right words to reassure her, the way he always supported her even when Abby herself didn’t. The way he always protected her. Now he was shielding Clarke with his own life. She was so grateful to him but despised herself for placing him in this position. If she hadn’t swallowed that chip, if she had found another way… If she had just left Arkadia with him when she had the chance, none of this would have happened. The burden of hindsight was her only company in the blackness.

She felt the vertebrae in her neck crack as she turned in the direction of A.L.I.E.’s irritatingly smooth voice. “Again,” it said, addressing the member of the Guard who had helped her incapacitate Marcus.

 _No!_ Abby screamed, railing against the veiled bonds that kept her trapped in the darkest recess of her mind. But no sound could escape the infinite void. No one heard her.

The hammer slammed into Marcus’ kneecap with a deafening crunch, and in an intense silence he somehow screamed with his entire body. Tears intermingled with the sweat on his face, his hands clenched so tightly that his knuckles turned white and his nails drew blood from his calloused palms.

“Where is Clarke?” she heard herself ask more forcibly. She tried to stop the words from reaching the open air, but they slipped past her lips, just out of reach. It was the torment of Tantalus. Every time she was tempted to reach out to Marcus, to stroke his face, to tell him that everything would be all right, A.L.I.E. pushed her deeper into the nebulous depths of her mind. She was doomed to an eternal temptation: to finally be reunited with the man she loves, yet never be able to touch him.

“I don’t know!” he yelled. They had been at this for over an hour. From a medical perspective, she didn’t think that his body could take much more torture; from a psychological perspective, she didn’t think she could hang on for much longer. Every swing of the hammer tore at her resistance. _There is no pain in the City of Light._ The hammer crashed down again, this time breaking a bone in Marcus’ right arm. “I don’t know,” he cried. The hammer moved up. Shattered his elbow. “I don’t know!” Dislocated his shoulder. “I don’t know! I don’t know!”

A.L.I.E.’s honeyed voice broke through the tumultuous discord. “Stop.”

Marcus gasped for air, the only sound in the abrupt silence.

“Clarke has been found. Marcus Kane is now irrelevant to Stage Three.” She rested her perfectly manicured hand on the waistline of her form-fitting red dress. “Kill him.”

Abby’s screams reverberated in the corners of her mind as she felt her hand grab Marcus’ discarded gun. _Please, no._ She was about to lose the two people she held most dear. Her hand tightened its grip on the gun. Their deaths would be on her. Her arm lifted the heavy weight and aimed it at his head. _Not again,_ she begged.

His eyes widened, his pupils sparking red in the light of the fire. “Abby…”

“Clarke has been found. You are now irrelevant,” she repeated, the words an emotionless imitation of A.L.I.E.

A flicker of worry crossed his face. “Abby, I know you’re in there somewhere.”

 _I am! Marcus, I’m right here!_ she screamed. But it was no use: she was a repressed memory just below the surface, a blurry illusion that might have been a dream once.

“Fight.” He was defeated, his voice a mere whisper. “You have to live. For Clarke. Please.”

Trapped inside her own body, she watched in horror as her index finger hovered above the cold, metal trigger. She fought against the invisible restraints that kept her from pointing the gun somewhere else, _anywhere else,_ but A.L.I.E. flooded her mind with excruciating pain. Torture. Jake. _You have to warn them, Abby._ Drill. Scream. Death. Shocklash. Marcus. _I can’t do this again._ Somewhere amidst the pain, she realized that this merciless surge of torturous memories was a good thing; A.L.I.E. was losing control. Abby struggled even harder and managed to move her finger by half a millimeter. A.L.I.E. moved it back. More pain. Agony. Scream. _I won’t let this happen to you._ Oh god, not him. Not like this. Not–

_BANG!_

\----------

It took Marcus a second to realize that he was still alive. Blood stained the grass crimson and seeped into the dirt, but he was relieved to find that it wasn’t his. Instead, Abby had shot the guardsman who had been torturing him, whose body was now a crumpled heap on the ground. It was painful to move, but he turned his head to look at her above him and saw a gleam of recognition in her brown eyes.

“Abby?” he whispered, almost daring to hope that it was really her.

A hitched sob escaped her lips. “Marcus. Oh God, Marcus, I’m so sorry…” Tears streamed down her face, and with shaking hands, she began to free him, her fingers catching on the knots in the rope. She wouldn’t look him in the eye.

He didn’t know what to say. There were no words to express how sorry he was, how he wished he had never left her alone in Arkadia. He wished he could assuage her guilt, but he was still trying to forgive himself. Nothing anybody said would convince him that he had done the right things in his past, so what could he possibly say to convince her that this wasn’t her fault? Eventually he settled on “it’s okay,” but nothing about this was okay.

Her face remained shell-shocked and she didn’t appear to hear him. She didn’t even acknowledge him; instead she turned around to look at the murky forest behind her.

“What is it?” he asked. He still didn’t quite understand what was happening. He knew that she had swallowed one of Jaha’s chips and that her kind soul had been replaced with something far more sinister, but at times it seemed like she was talking to someone who wasn’t there.

“Get out of my head,” she demanded of the air. She listened for a moment. “No!” Then her body buckled beneath her and she fell next to him, convulsing and screaming. She pressed the heels of her palms against her skull, frantically clawing at her hair. “Make it stop!”

“Abby!” She had only managed to free his injured arm before she collapsed, but that was enough. He grimaced as bone struck nerve, but he persevered and untied his other hand, then his feet in quick succession. Finally he took her in his arms, ignoring how much it hurt to do so, and ran a hand over her beautiful face that was now contorted in pain. “Abby, what’s wrong? Abby!”

The shrill, terrifying sounds coming from her mouth had a raw quality, the realness of pain that was all-consuming.

It stopped as fast as it started and she went still.

He panicked and shook her shoulders. “Abby?”

In a calculated move, her hand went for the gun that she had dropped moments earlier; she pressed it against her temple. Her eyes darted back and forth, wild with fear.

“Abby, no!” He covered her hand with his own, prying her fingers away from the trigger. The broken muscles in his arm were too damaged to pull the gun from her grasp on their own, but a surge of adrenaline flooded his brain stem and he wrenched the gun away. He threw it as far as he could and his dislocated shoulder sent a shooting pain down his arm that caught at the bone peeking through his skin. He cried out, his face gnarled in a grimace.

Her hand clamped down hard on his thigh and the strength of her grip was unexpected, like he was the only thing keeping her grounded. “Marcus… Help. She’s–” She began to batter her head against the hard ground beneath her, repeatedly concussing herself. He held her tight against his body, immobilizing her.

“Abby, look at me. Focus!”

Her gaze landed on the fallen guardsman. “His… Grab his…” She thrashed in his arms, involuntarily resisting his attempts to stop her suicide. “His shock baton!”

“Abby…”

“Shock me,” she pleaded. “Back of the neck.” She let out another piercing scream that tore through him like a great shard of glass as a new wave a fresh torment bombarded her mind.

His objections died on his lips; there wasn’t time to ask questions. The guardsman was too far away. He would have to let go of Abby and risk her killing herself in the seconds they were out of contact. He held his breath. _3, 2, 1…_ He let go and scrambled across the ground towards the guardsman, shouting as pain from his knee nearly incapacitated him.

Her hands clawed at the dirt and found a jagged rock.

His fingers closed around the baton.

She pressed the rock against her carotid artery. He wouldn’t make it back to her in time, but she froze, granting him the extra second he needed to drag himself over the remaining distance between them. Somehow she had the presence of mind to roll over onto her stomach, allowing him access to her neck. He turned on the baton and it came alive with electricity. The rock cut into the first layer of her skin. He shocked her at the base of her neck before it could go deeper and she screamed.

“Again!” she yelled as the sparks subsided.

He shocked her again and tremors wracked her body. Finally she closed her eyes. She was breathing heavily but appeared to be through the worst of it.

She pulled herself up with great effort and looked at him. “She’ll be back,” she said. “You have to cut her out of me.”

He didn’t hesitate to grab the dead guardsman’s knife, bravado masking his fear. “What do I do?”

She smoothly pulled her frayed hair to one side. “Make… Make a small incision at the base of my neck, one inch below my hairline.”

He nearly dropped the knife. When she had told him to cut A.L.I.E. out of her, somehow he hadn’t realized that he would be cutting _her._

“You can do this, Marcus,” she reassured him. “But you have to hurry.”

He steeled his nerves and placed the blade on her delicate skin. “Are you sure?” he asked.

She gave him a weary nod.

He cut into her skin and she jerked forward. He hated himself for adding more pain to the cacophony of misery she was already experiencing, but he knew he had to do this or she would be lost to him forever. He dug around with the knife, not exactly sure what he was looking for. Then an oily black substance oozed from the incision and onto the ground. She slumped over and let out a long sigh. The nightmare was finally over.

“She’s gone,” she said, her voice like a quavering leaf in the wind.

With his good arm, he pulled her into his lap and held her tight. He winced as her weight pressed against his wounds, but he took comfort in the pressure of having her so close when she had been so far from him just moments earlier.

She began to sob into his bloodied shirt. “I was screaming,” she whimpered. “I was screaming for you to hear.”

“I heard you, Abby.” He stroked her hair, willing all of her pain to go away. “You’re gonna be okay.” The torture he experienced in the past few hours was nothing compared to what A.L.I.E. had done to her. He had a few shattered bones, but her mind had been invaded; she had been forced to do despicable things. He forgave her instantly, but he knew she would never forgive herself. Just as he would never forgive himself for letting her stay at Arkadia. Guilt was so deeply ingrained in their relationship. He briefly wondered if they would ever be happy.

Her sobs slowed to whimpers and she managed to speak. “Clarke… A.L.I.E. knows where she is. We have to go.”

He knew he wouldn’t be able to change her mind; he had never been able to. Despite the hell that had just been inflicted upon her, she was a tough, strong woman who would endure anything to save her daughter. She had suffered so much pain in her life, but he never viewed her as weak. Her continued hope made her strong. It made _them_ strong.

She untangled herself from his embrace, careful not to touch his broken arm, then knelt down beside the dead guardsman, the first person she had ever killed. She wiped her tears on the back of her sleeve. Marcus saw the guilt almost consume her, but she rose above it. She set her lips into a thin line and mechanically removed the dead man’s jacket, ripping it into pieces to form a sling. He allowed her to pull it over his head and manipulate it around his arm.

He heard the pop before he felt it. Then he cried out as pain radiated from a focal point beneath his shoulder blade.

“I’m sorry, Marcus.”

She finished settling his arm into the crook of the sling and he winced as the rough fabric grazed against an exposed nerve.

“I have to wrap your knee too,” she said apologetically.

He braced himself for the pain to come and nodded. She placed her hands on either side of his knee to straighten his leg and he hissed as the shattered pieces of his patella shifted violently, tendons stretching to accommodate the new alignment. He gritted his teeth as she wrapped strips of fabric around his knee, but it got more bearable with each new layer. Finally, she tied the last piece into place.

“Do you think you can walk?” she asked quietly.

“Yes.” She helped him stand up and he put all of his weight on his good leg. Pulverized kneecap be damned; he was going with her no matter what. He would also endure whatever it took to save her daughter.

Her downcast eyes stared at the dirt. “Thank you,” she murmured.

He angled towards her, dwarfing her small frame. “For what?”

“For protecting Clarke.”

He tilted her chin up and urged her to look at him. They were inches apart. “Of course.”

Shadows danced across her face. Then, for the first time in weeks, he saw her lips curl up ever so slightly in what he could only describe as an expression of hope.


End file.
